Founded in 1970 as the Institute of Medicine (IOM), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) is one of three academies that make up the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) in the United States.

Note:  In the five years since this report was published, AI had made substantial advances.  It’s use in health care has expanded, yet still only in its early stages relative to applications and impact.

From the report:  The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for better health care offers unprecedented opportunities to improve patient and clinical team outcomes, reduce costs, and impact population health. Examples include but are not limited to automation; providing patients, “family” (friends, family, and unpaid caregivers), and health professionals with an understandable synthesis of complex health information; and recommendations and visualization of information for shared decision making.

While there have been a number of promising examples of AI applications in health care, we believe it is imperative to proceed with caution, else we may end up with user disillusionment and another AI winter, and/or further exacerbate existing health-and technology-driven disparities.

This Special Publication, Artificial Intelligence in Health Care: The Hope, the Hype, the Promise, the Peril synthesizes current knowledge to offer a reference document for relevant health care stakeholders such as AI model developers, clinical implementers, clinicians and patients, regulators, and policy makers, to name a few. It outlines the current and near-term AI solutions; highlights the challenges, limitations, and best practices for AI development, adoption, and maintenance; offers an overview of the legal and regulatory landscape for AI tools designed for health care application; prioritizes the need for equity, inclusion, and a human rights lens for this work; and outlines key considerations for moving forward. The major theses are summarized in the section below